Locked into Strangeness

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Lucien: What's happened to my hair? Audric: You've gotten a little streak from the shock of the Dark Gift. Not unusual. The shock's greater for some than others... why, I used to be a brunet! Imagine! And as for Ginevra, she used to be a man!!

Let's say you're a typical protagonist, and you've stumbled upon a MacGuffin or had some kind of incredible, scarring experience. It tends to change you — and it especially tends to change your hair. Skunk Stripes, Multicolored Hair and more are common mementos left on your once lovely locks.

At one point in the manga, Tetsuo's hair turns completely grey as the result of a major psychic revelation. Later, after he shortly turns into a Blob Monster then reconstitutes himself, his body has lost all pigmentation.

The three psychic children that survived the original catastrophe besides Akira (Kyouko, Takashi and Masaru), also all have white hair (along with albino skin and premature aging), but we don't know if this was gradual or not.

In the manga version of Chrono Crusade, Aion's hair turned completely white (on top of his skin becoming darker, for whatever reason) when he saw forbidden knowledge during his coming-of-age ceremony, including the fact that the demon's Hive Queen was originally a human woman pregnant with twins — him and Chrono. It's implied his hair and skin color was identical to Chrono's before the change.

Half the hair on Jio's head from 666 Satan is white, to go along with his heterochromatic eyes. Being possessed by Satan does wonders for his personal appearance.

Read or Die, the TV series: In the final episode, Joker's hair turns entirely white after being put in direct contact with the mind of Mr. Gentleman. He also goes more or less catatonic. Considering that his hair was naturally platinum blond before this, one might have a difficult time telling the difference.

In the Gungrave anime, Brandon's black hair turns grey after he's reborn as "Beyond the Grave".

In Mushishi, coming into contact with certain mushi alters your appearance. This is what happened to Ginko, and previously to his mentor, Nui.

In Soul Eater, Death the Kidd's three horizontal hair stripes, which normally only cover half of his head, begin to stretch around to the other side of his head and connect one at a time when he receives a major power up. In the manga, this happens because he had been carrying a powerful MacGuffin called BREW which unlocks his true potential. In the anime, it just happens spontaneously. In the manga this is only temporary. However, when he reaches his full potential on his own in the final battle, the hair stripes connect permanently and he becomes a true shinigami in place of his father.

Argento Soma sees protagonist Takuto developing one heck of an epic streak after his girlfriend and her mentor are flattened by the wreckage of a laboratory demolished by an escaping alien named Frank.

Hayate the Combat Butler: Isumi's hair is turned white when she uses too much of her power during the Athens arc. Interestingly, when she lost her powers in an earlier arc, no comment is made on her hair changing color in any way.

In Howl's Moving Castle, the main character Sophie eventually gets her youth back after being cursed to old age, but her hair stays silver. Both she and Howl think it looks good, though.

In D.Gray-Man, Allen Walker's white, originally red-ish light brown, hair is the result of the trauma from his Innocence destroying Akuma Mana after he resurrected him with the Millennium Earl's powers.

In the Trinity Blood anime, the originally blonde Astaroshe Asran received a single blood-red forelock from a head wound in her backstory. In the original novels, she was originally a Fiery Redhead, whose hair went completely white except that one forelock after the death of her mother.

About a fifth of the way into the Trigun manga, we notice that Vash (who has just been given an Important Haircut) suddenly has black streaks in his hair. Later on, it's revealed that all Plants are born with blonde hair (or strawberry-blonde in one case), which turns black as their power is used up. Once it turns completely black, the Plant dies. This is unfortunate news, as Vash's own hair by this point is mostly black. Note that the anime adaptation does not have this plot point.

Readers can actually watch Vash's hair turn from almost completely blond to nearly black throughout the story; the changes appear incrementally, and after each time he uses his Angel Arm.

In the epilogue, we see that Vash is still alive despite his hair being completely black. He either has one random blond strand somewhere we can't see, or he and Knives simply don't work like other Plants, which itself makes some sense since they are the only known male ones.

Upon activating the Nirvash Mark I, Ao's hair color changes from his father's brown to his mother's turquoise in Eureka Seven AO.

No6's Shion started out looking like a regular dark-haired Japanese guy, but his hair turns white after surviving the birth of a parasite wasp - which usually induces Rapid Aging - and then falling into a coma for several days.

Comic Books

The DCU supervillain Prometheus' backstory; his hair went white when his parents were gunned down in front of him by the cops.

In the Belgian series Papyrus, the title hero had his once raven-black hair turn white after being frightened to death by a venomous snake crawling over him for hours. It's a plot point later, as an evil demon sees the white-haired Egyptian kid and is shocked to death as well, which saves Papyrus's life.

Astro City's Samaritan has his hair turn blue after the Time Travel incident that gives him his powers. He can change it to white at will, but apparently not back to its original black. His archenemy Infidel's hair also changed color as a result of the same incident, going from black to green, though when not using his powers it's blond.

In The Corinthian: Death In Venice, Amedeo's hair turns abruptly white when his body is possessed by the Corinthian. His already mentally-disturbed lover, Coco (or Pestilence, or Columbina), alludes to this trope, saying she's willing to bet it didn't happen out of fear...

In X-Men, Rogue got her trademark Skunk Stripe after her powers first manifested. She was having her First Kiss, and accidentally sent the boy into a coma. This event triggers a lot of guilt on Rogue's part, and throughly establishes to her the danger of her ability. Afterwards, she starts isolating herself from others.

In Preacher Herr Starr's hair fell out when he was five years old the night after a group of boys scratched his right eye out.

Nathan Never. After seeing her wife horribly slaughtered by a man he arrested time before, most of his hairs (all but the sides) turn white. Instantly, to the horror of a couple cops present. Curiously, when Nathan meets an alternate-universe himself, he sports white hairs too, even if his wife is alive and well.

Being resurrected as part of the Vigil in Death Vigil grants the person Mystical White Hair. The protagonist, Sam, calls it the "dye after you die club".

In The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Scrooge succeeds in scaring off the Whiskervilles from the grounds of his ancestral castle, and as a result they all have completely white hair from then on.

Lady Death originally had blonde hair and blue eyes as a human, but they turned into complete white after being sent to Hell and having her body corrupted by its surrounding energies.

The Shinigami from Project Tatterdemalion don't just gain tentacles and psychic powers from a genetically engineered super vaccine, it also replaces their hair with swaying psychic tendrils, often in unnatural colors like purple or silver.

Gentaro has black hair as shown in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades. In SplitxEnd, it's stated that he originally had white hair because he's a descendant of Asclepius. He gained the black hair after a traumatic experience in his life—his parents' death. Tears to Shed also hints that the power also has to do with Ophiuchus saving him from death.

Show Within a Show example: In Bolt, Bolt's superdog tv persona acquires a black lightning-bolt mark on one side when Penny's scientist father equips him with superpowers. It's actually painted on, and fades as Bolt learns to be a regular dog.

As a child Anna from Frozen got a white streak in her hair when her sister Elsa accidentally struck her in the head with her ice magic. Later on, her hair starts quickly becoming whiter after Elsa accidentally freezes her heart; her skin also becomes paler and frostbitten as she gets closer to totally freezing. However, after she thaws out following her Heroic Sacrifice, her hair no longer has the streak.

In Song of the Sea, Saoirse's hair starts to turn white to show how a long time without wearing her coat is taking a toll on her body. Bronagh, in the beginning, also got some white hair to show how bad her pregnancy really was for her.

Films — Live-Action

In Young Frankenstein, Elizabeth's hair gets two white streaks after she's been abducted by the monster. This is mostly so she can have the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo later, because it's funnier that way. Of course, then there's the Bride herself...

This happened to the Mom in Poltergeist after she rescued her little daughter from that ghost world – two white streaks in hair, one at each temple.

In The Royal Tenenbaums, the pet hawk that is released early in the film returns towards the end, but with a good deal of his feathers turned white. His owner speculates that he must have had some kind of shocking or traumatic experience, but he isn't really sure.

Constantine. Constantine tells the men helping him with the possessed girl "Close your eyes. And whatever happens, don't look." One of them does and his hair instantly turns white.

In ''Ghostbusters (2016) Abby and Erin gain white hair after being hit by lightning in the Ghost Dimension.

Folklore

In Breton mythology, one story about Ankou (An entity similar to The Grim Reaper) describes his cart breaking down on the side of the road. Three men encounter him. Two of them throw stones at him and run away; the third offers to fix his cart. The next day, the pair who ran away are dead, while the one who stayed merely had his hair turn white.

This trope is a bit of a theme in Celtic mythology as Fionn Mac Cuṁail from Irish folklore takes his name "Fionn" meaning "Fair" from his hair (Indeed, he was born as Demna but later took on the name Fionn). According to legend, he had white hair from a very young age, though accounts vary on how he got it; A popular version has an jealous Faery force him prematurely into old age when he fell in love with someone else, only for her to regret it and return Fionn's youth but fail to reverse the change in his hair.

Literature

A Prayer for Owen Meany: Johnny has this happen to him when he (apparently) has a beyond the grave encounter with Owen.

In The Witcher book series, Geralt says his hair turned white during the Trials. Possibly due to his unique heritage, he received minimal side effects from the Trial of the Grasses. His teachers then decided to subject him to additional experiments, which he survived, with the most noticeable results being his white hair, totally devoid of pigmentation.

This is the reason for Polgara's white lock. She got it when her father, the sorcerer Belgarath, first laid his hand upon her after she was born. It resists cutting and dyeing, which has led to some interesting dilemmas when they've been trying to hide from their enemies. This trope shows up in the entire Rivan royal line, too, and (possibly?) all the disciples of Aldur. Polgara's hair is just the most striking example. With most disciples, it appears as a sort of birthmark. Garion's is the most consistent, as all descendants of Riva Iron-Grip carry the mark on their palm: the same palm Riva used to touch the Orb of Aldur.

Additionally, Belgarath's hair is entirely white (as befits his age). In the Book of Alorn, this is put down to frost settling in his hair during the trek across the frozen land bridge between Aloria and Mallorea. But in Belgarath the Sorcerer, he claims that it had gone white before then, and blames stress from dealing with the Alorns. However, the early narrative points to a more prosaic reason: he'd simply been around for a while and lost track of time.

Uncle Andrew, the Magician in C. S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew tells his nephew Digory Kirke that his hair turned white as a result of the bizarre magical experiments performed in order to create the rings.

In Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams, Simon gains a scar and white streak in his hair after being burned by dragon's blood. From then on he's often referred to as Simon Snowlock.

Several of Kay Hooper's characters in her psychic series end up with a white streak going through their hair.

Raistlin in Dragonlance had his hair turned white by the Test of High Sorcery, among the other bizarre changes it wrought to his appearance.

In the Dragonlance The New Adventures books, Nearra got a streak of black (the "possessed" hair color) in her normally blond (the "normal" hair color) hair after the events of the first book, in which she came dangerously close to having her Superpowered Evil Side take over.

Discworld: Susan Sto Helit, adoptive granddaughter of Death, is slightly more than human because of the odd way heredity works on the Disc. Signifying this, her hair is pure white with a single black streak running through it.

In the Zoë Martinique series, Zoe gets, then looses, and then gets again, a white lock of hair. It also changes sizes a few times.

Kim Ford of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry. Her hair all turns pure white after she completes her "apprenticeship". A later book, Ysabel, reveals some of the problems she had when she returned to our world, by refusing to dye it back or pretend her experiences didn't happen.

In Anne McCaffrey's Talents series, the Rowan has her hair turn totally white as a result of childhood trauma. Her children and grandchildren inherit white streaks.

Fitz from the Realm of the Elderlings series had a literal scarring experience that turned a streak of his hair white – someone bashed him over the head with an axe. He decided to go by the name of Tom Badgerlock in the second trilogy for this very reason. He got better later in the series, and had to quickly figure out why he now no longer had a white lock in his hair.

Erast Fandorin's temples become completely gray (in sharp contrast to the rest of his hair, which remains black until very old age) after witnessing his wife blown to pieces by an assassin's bomb in the end of the first novel. In a much later book, the villain used this characteristic trait (and a few others) to successfully impersonate Fandorin.

After Doc experiences God in Lester del Rey's short story "For I Am A Jealous People", his hair turns white.

In the Corean Chronicles beings who use the conduits linking worlds are transformed due to the long journey. This makes identifying ifrits and those possessed by their powers easier for those who know.

Max Barry's Machine Man has Cassandra Cautery. The cyborg security guard Carl almost kills her and everyone else at Better Future. Afterwards, her hair is "the color of ash".

In Les Misérables, the emotional turmoil Valjean goes through while trying to decide whether he should reveal himself as an ex-convict and save a man who has been falsely accused makes his hair turn completely white overnight.

In Elinor M Brent-Dyer's Chalet School series, Miss Wilson's hair turns white after she and a group of students are forced to escape from local Nazis via a secret passageway.

A mundane example in the second Circle of Magic quartet is Kethlun Warder, Tris's apprentice. He has a white patch in his otherwise blond hair from a lightning strike.

A non-supernatural example in Gary Jennings' Aztec : Zyanya has black hair, except for a streak of white at the front. Her mother explains that a scorpion stung her at her hairline when she was a baby and her hair was always white at that spot.

In The Grisha Trilogy, Alina's hair turns white at the end of Siege and Storm after she exploits her connection with the Darkling to take control of his nichevo'ya and create her own.

Live-Action TV

Torchwood: Revealed courtesy of Martha Jones in the episode "Reset", enough exposure to time radiation will forever alter you down to the genetic level, which had the added effect of granting a limited immunity/resistance to being caught up in events that change the timestream in unnatural ways. Doctor Who elaborates on this by saying that as a time traveller, you perceive time differently: one benefit is that you will still remember anything that was lost by time being rewritten or even unwritten (but you have to try really hard). And please try very hard not to conceive a child while within the time vortex itself (in the safety of a TARDIS), or it might just grow up to be a Time Lord. (Ordinary Gallifreyans became true Time Lords through centuries of exposure to time radiation, making them nearly ageless and damn close to immortal, and able to perceive all possible pasts and futures).

The early Charmed episode "From Fear to Eternity" has Prue's hair turning slightly white due to nearly drowning because the sisters are being targeted by Barbas for the first time; all the other witches targeted by him die of fear, with completely white hair.

In Twin Peaks, Leland Palmer's hair turns white after he kills Jacques Reanult in the first season's finale.

On Millennium Frank's hair turns white after Catherine dies in the Group-engineered plague. It's downplayed in Season 3, with white only at the temples.

Discussed on an early episode of Married... with Children. The Bundy family goes on vacation to an odd little town in Florida, and the local yokels refer to Kelly (who had bleached platinum blonde hair) as "that poor little white-haired girl." They decide something must have scared her to make her hair that way.

Music

In the song "Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm" by the Crash Test Dummies, the first verse is entirely about this trope. Namely, it's about a boy whose hair turned "from black into bright white" as the result of a traumatic car accident.

Voltaire's "The Beast of Pirate's Bay" includes a verse about Blackbeard the pirate's encounter with the beast resulting in his beard turning white and making him look like Santa Claus.

2D, lead singer of the rock band Gorillaz, fell out of a tree at a young age, landing on his head and knocking all his hair out. It grew back in bright blue and has stayed that way since.

Tabletop Games

Continuum - Roleplaying in the Yet. The supplement Further Information: A Gamemaster's Treasury of Time has a Virgin Era NPC named Gos Poyikt. His hair is prematurely grey due to a horrible childhood experience he doesn't like to talk about.

Mage: The Awakening allows this (for varying durations) via the Branding Paradox result, which inflicts upon the mage an unnatural feature ranging from an odd scent to scales and a tail.

In Ars Magica, mages who get overwhelmed by magical power and shunted into Twilight sometimes come back with minor modifications like iridescent eyes, hands that leave sooty marks on anything they touch, or the lingering smell of sulphur.

Itsuki - the boy locked in the storehouse - in Fatal Frame II has his hair turn white overnight after killing his twin brother during the ritual. This seems to occur with some Remainings while others keep their normal hair color.

Also happens to Tsuzuri Osaka, one of the ghosts in Fatal Frame 3. She had also killed her twin sister, though the backstory to this falls under All There in the Manual.

Deadly Premonition. Zach's hair turned from brown to white upon witnessing the dead of both of his parents and being attacked by Kaysen. His hair, as well as scar, are hidden throughout the whole game as the players play through the viewpoint of his second personality, York, who selectively omits these two changes to Zach's appearance.

This is actually inverted in Last Scenario, when a blond character's hair turns black after prolonged exposure to a harmful magical substance.

Jill goes blonde (not albino) in Resident Evil 5. If you pay very close attention it's mentioned this is a result of harvesting T antibodies from her blood stream, which makes slightly more sense. This explanation verges on Truth in Television. It isn't unusual for patients undergoing treatment with chemicals or radiation (such as chemotherapy treatment for cancer) to find that their hair grows in a different shade and/or texture after treatment.

In XCOM 2, soldiers who undergo training as a Psi Operative gain Mystical White Hair as a side effect of unlocking their Psychic Powers. That said, you can just as easily use the game's character customization options to change it back to their original color, or any color you'd like.

Visual Novels

Intense magic use in the Nasuverse has the potential to change hair, eye, and even skin pigmentation.

Aoko Aozaki's red hair is credited to her abuse of thaumaturgy.

Archer's white hair, gray eyes, and dark skin is implied, before eventual confirmation in Fate/EXTRA, to be the result of overusing his thaumaturgy.

In Dangan Ronpa, Kiyotaka Ishimaru has his hair turned white after he gets out of a funk after Oowada's trial and subsequent execution, in which Alter Ego consoles him by mimicking Oowada's voice and changing his face display and he gains a new personality named Ishida. It returns to his normal color after he is killed.

The anthropomorphic raccoon hero of Tales of the Questor has a white cow-lick where he was touched by a mythic entity — believed by some to be equivalent to an angel.

Can happen to vampires in Bite Me! Lucien gets a white streak in his hair, while Audric's hair is completely white. Ginevra also gained a streak, though contrary to Audric's claim, she was always female.

Happens many times in The Dragon Doctors. The wizard Sarin has green hair as a leftover from when she was turned into a tree. The shaman Kili's hair turned white when she was haunted as a child, and when Kili and her boyfriend Greg became werewolves later, a side-effect was their hair growing really long. There's also been one case of a woman trapped in slow motion having her hair grow several inches when she's accelerated back to normal speed.

In When She Was Bad, Amber Price's hair turns blue when she receives superpowers. She is initially distraught by the change, and eventually starts wearing a wig to hide it.

Arthur in Find Chaos has vivid blue hair, but was blond in the flashback comics. In the interim, he escaped from a mental institution by "...dying. A little."; it's not yet confirmed whether the two are related.

Web Original

In Jerry, young Jerry's hair turns completely white after he takes a peek into Closet of Unimaginable Psychological Horror. However, later cartoons show that his hair continued to grow in with its regular color, until he was back to normal.

Western Animation

The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: Juniper Lee gained a fuchsia Skunk Stripe on the left side of her head upon becoming the Te Xuan Ze, with the hairstreak being justified in-show as "the mark of the Great Protector". In the episode where June is shown getting her powers it's plain white, in the show proper it is a weird mix of dark pink and fuschia. Likely not a result of dying it, since other Te Xuan Ze's shown before have a similar color of hairstreak, excluding Jasmine Lee whose streak was lilac. Her grandmother's streak turned gray upon aging. Juniper's streak also fits in rather well with her status as lead of her and her siblings' rock band.

In Transformers Animated, it's been revealed that this is how Isaac Sumdac got the grey/white streak in his otherwise black hair. He found a protoform, and when he touched it, it did... something to him while scanning his DNA, resulting in said hair.

In Gargoyles, gangster Tony Dracon has a Skunk Stripe in his hair after his first appearance in "Deadly Force"; Word of God says that the in-universe rationale for this is because Dracon's first encounter with the gargoyles scared him so badly.

Princess Yue of Avatar: The Last Airbender was a sickly child but perfectly dark-haired; her hair turned white when the Moon Spirit healed her.

According to the "Cutie Mark Chronicles" episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Pinkie Pie's curly mane and tail used to be straight, until she was hit by the force of Rainbow Dash's first sonic rainboom, which also made her want to spend her life smiling and having fun.

This is proven in a following episode, "Party of One", where her hair immediately loses its curl when she thinks her friends no longer like her and all the joy drains out of her life. Referenced in the next episode, "Best Night Ever", where Rarity tries to straighten her hair. It works... for about three seconds, when her excitement about the Grand Galloping Gala causes her hair to become curly again.

Shown again twice in Season 4. In "Pinkie Pride", her hair is shown to have lost some of its bounce when newcomer Cheese Sandwich has bested her at her own special talent, throwing parties, and her friends ask him to organize a party for Rainbow Dash even though she had been doing so for days. The second time, in "Maud Pie", Pinkie's hair partially deflates on-camera (with sound-effect) when the others tell her they were unable to form any kind of rapport with her big sister Maud.

In the Futurama episode "Mobius Dick", Zoidberg is so traumatized by a Space Whale attack that he grows hair just so it can turn white.

In the Legion Of Superheroes In his normal form Timber Wolf's eyes, fur, claws, fangs and pointy ears were a result of his father tampering with his DNA too much. Before he was experimented on he was a normal looking human boy. After being shocked by the Lightning Beasts, Garth and his brother, Mekt ended up with electric blue eyes instead of brown as well as Garth's scar on his face and Mekt's dark hair turning white, after the events of Dark Victory Brainy became human (except he still had green skin and white circles on his forehead in the shape of the Brainiac symbol) when he was an android for the previous episodes.

Starlite from Rainbow Brite originally had a white mane. When Wisp became Rainbow Brite he gained the ability to fly, and his mane turned rainbow.

The Simpsons: Kent Brockman got his white hair when he snuck backstage at a theme park and saw its mouse mascot take his head off. In the same episode, Barney's hair turns white then he is told that the park's castle was really made of plywood.

Real Life

There's an autoimmune condition called alopecia areata, which causes hair to fall out. If your hair has started to go gray, the condition will preferentially make the darker hairs fall out. Further, autoimmune conditions can be brought on by sudden stress. Ergo, a shock can trigger this condition, your dark hair falls out, and what's left is much grayer... This is probably the origin of this whole trope.

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